OK, I have read Volume I [200 pages ugh]. Did the Trump campaign collude with the Russians?
Remember: Collude: to cooperate in a secret or unlawful way in order to deceive or gain an advantage over others.
See pages 185-188 of Volume I of the report, which makes it clear that the Trump campaign tried to collude, and also makes it clear why Mueller et al. chose not to prosecute under available statutes.
[spoiler alert: Don Jr. was too dumb to know that what he was doing was illegal.]
The Mueller Report is going to become the new Warren Commission Report.
ReplyDeleteNo. The Warren Commission was basically under instructions form the President and under pressure from J Edgar Hoover to find against conspiracy and in favour of the the thesis that Oswald acted alone. LBJ wanted that finding because he was privately suspicious of a Castroite conspiracy. If the Commission had found that Oswald was a tool of Castro that would have been a casus belli for a war with Cuba that might have touched off a nuclear conflict with the USSR. Not wanting that, LBJ pressured the Commission to come up with a finding the he himself believed was probably false.
ReplyDeleteMueller by contrast seems to have been genuinely independent. If the summaries I have read are correct he
a) presents extensive evidence of collusion between various members of the Trump campaign and the Russians which however never quite rises to the level of criminal conspiracy;
and
b) Provides a strong (though perhaps not overwhelming) case for obstruction of justice in the part of the President.
He does not seem ot have been the patsy that the Warren Commissioners collectively consented to become .
When this whole thing began, everyone or almost everyone saw Mueller as a pillar of integrity and now I see that people are beginning to cast doubts on his genuine independence, to use your phrase.
ReplyDeleteMy impression is that the Mueller Report will satisfy no one, neither the left because it doesn't provide enough dirt on Trump to convince Republicans in the Senate to vote for his removal nor the Republicans because it suggests that Trump is corrupt and affirms that he colluded, although did not conspire, with the evil Mr. Putin.
That general dissatisfaction will give rise to doubts about the report itself, since people want to hear what confirms their previous prejudices. I'm not claiming that all people only want to hear what confirms their previous prejudices, obviously not, but there are enough people like that and they are insistent enough, especially in the age of social media and of fake news, that in a little while it will become received wisdom that the Mueller Report is not entirely trustworthy. Those rumors will be fomented by suspicious minds on the right and on the left, and every little inexactness in the Mueller Report will "reveal" that the whole thing is, like the Warren Commission Report, a cover-up of what "really happened". "What really happened" will never be known, as it is not known who really was behind the conspiracy to kill JFK, but everyone will have their own pet theories, books will be written about it and smart people (not you or me) will make money off of those theories.
I have no theory myself about what "really happened" nor do I have a theory about who was really behind JFK's assassination. I have no idea if Mueller is honest or not, I'm merely describing a very possible future scenario. Time will tell if I am correct or not. Happy Easter (it must be Easter already where you live), Professor Pigden.
I don't expect the in group here to respond to my comments, so I'll volunteer this: it chaps my ass (to borrow a phrase from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius) that the Cambridge Tripos in Human, Social and Political Science doesn't include The Future of Socialism by Robert Paul Wolff, among other works, in the reading list.
ReplyDelete@ N. Nihilist
ReplyDeleteI'm not intimately familiar w the structure of the Cambridge curriculum, but you seem to have linked to one paper in that Tripos, not the whole thing.
LFC, what an unforgivable transgression! One of us or both will have to look up the whole thing.
ReplyDeleteLFC, I suppose it falls to me. After all, you were genuinely interested in the whole thing, and not merely moved to point out that the tripos was more than the single paper linked. Or the other way around. In any case, here are two more: Part IIA and the 63-page Political Philosophy and the History of Political Thought Since C.1890.
ReplyDeleteThanks, NN.
ReplyDelete